The Great American Pie Company by Ellis Parker Butler — A Pie Company Finds a Recipe for Endless Profit

Eph Deacon sells pies for a living, or rather his wife bakes them and he carries the basket, which suits his philosophy just fine. Then Phineas Doolittle starts undercutting him from across the river, and what begins as a squabble on a bridge turns into something much bigger, and much sillier. Before long the two men have talked themselves into buying up farms, bakeries, and even a railroad, all in the name of cornering the pie market once and for all. Ellis Parker Butler, the man who gave the world "Pigs Is Pigs," turns small-town rivalry into an empire of hot air, one slice at a time.

Ellis Parker Butler was an Iowa-born humorist who wrote more than two thousand stories, essays, and poems over a career spanning four decades, though he never quite escaped the shadow of his most famous creation, "Pigs Is Pigs." Published in 1904, "The Great American Pie Company" shows off the same gift for watching ordinary ambition curdle into absurdity, set against the folksy backdrop of a small Midwestern town not unlike the one Butler grew up in.

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